I tell my laptop to put the video in the vga port. It does. That’s it. There’s nothing plugged in, but it’s there.

I plug a vga cable in. There’s video in there now. With enough paperclips, I could get it out the other end. My laptop does not care. It wiggles the electrons regardless.

I plug the other end of the cable in. The shielding was eaten by mice and two pins are dead. But alas, lo and behold, purple tho it may be - the video comes out and is displayed.

Meanwhile, hdmi protocol negotiation wants to know if you’d like to set your screen as the default sound device. Not that teams would use it anyway. Actually nevermind, the receiving end doesn’t support the correct copyright protection suite. Get fucked, no video for you.